Field Notes by Mary Cresswell

You are a cockleburr on my hiking socks
opportunist seed of the parapara.

Every day we find ourselves in many spaces – green fields, force fields, playing fields, battlefields, left field or right field – where the ground rules differ and it’s important to stay aware of the differences. Likewise, these poems follow various rules – double dactyls, sonnets, ballads, haiku dragged out of word clouds, ghazals, riffs on particular obsessions, homophonic word games, serious observations disguised as humour (and vice versa). They are written from a joy in words and in a hope that they might be useful notes to our own fields of vision.

About the author

Mary Cresswell began her career as a poet after an earlier career as technical writer and natural-history editor. She came to New Zealand from Los Angeles in 1970, spent many years doing freelance work in Wellington, and now lives on the Kāpiti Coast.

Reviews

“Cresswell’s structures are taut, her language lissome, leading us from opening lines, ‘Don’t expect miracles/ only surprises’ into a book of amazements.”— Siobhan Harvey